At the age of fourteen Ramsey Campbell found a paperback collection of stories by H.P. Lovecraft in a Liverpool sweet shop. The discovery of the collection, Campbell has gone on record as saying, ‘made me a writer’, providing a template which he would at first imitate and then explore creatively to develop a series of award-winning short stories and novels, such as The Parasite (1980), Incarnate (1983), The Hungry Moon (1986), Ancient Images (1989), The Long Lost (1993) and most recently Secret Stories (2005).

Lovecraft, as Campbell would only later discover, was, like himself, someone whose weird fiction was partly an attempt to deal with profound personal difficulties. In the introduction to The Face That Must Die (1983), Campbell described his own upbringing in what some would call a severely dysfunctional family and others something like an extract from his own fiction. There are, however, other resonances between the two as writers whose fictions map the tensions between geography, topography and consciousness. In other words, each writer uses setting to express both a series of personal and social anxieties and a more existential response to Pascal's terrifying ‘infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing’. Or, to put it even more into words which could also have been written by a horror writer, ‘If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’

At the age of fourteen Ramsey Campbell found a paperback collection of stories by H.P. Lovecraft in a Liverpool sweet shop. The discovery of the collection, Campbell has gone on record as saying, ‘made me a writer’, providing a template which he would at first imitate and then explore creatively to develop a series of award-winning short stories and novels, such as The Parasite (1980), Incarnate (1983), The Hungry Moon (1986), Ancient Images (1989), The Long Lost (1993) and most recently Secret Stories (2005).

Lovecraft, as Campbell would only later discover, was, like himself, someone whose weird fiction was partly an attempt to deal with profound personal difficulties. In the introduction to The Face That Must Die (1983), Campbell described his own upbringing in what some would call a severely dysfunctional family and others something like an extract from his own fiction. There are, however, other resonances between the two as writers whose fictions map the tensions between geography, topography and consciousness. In other words, each writer uses setting to express both a series of personal and social anxieties and a more existential response to Pascal's terrifying ‘infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing’. Or, to put it even more into words which could also have been written by a horror writer, ‘If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’

At the age of four Campbell had himself encountered the abyss staring back at him from a children's annual featuring the popular cartoon character Rupert Bear and a story involving a macabre Christmas tree. A chance glimpse a few years later in a Southport shop of a copy of Weird Tales (the magazine with which, as he was to learn, Lovecraft was most closely associated) left him with an image of horror which grew more exaggerated over the years. His obsession with it may also have been fed by the fact that his mother had forbidden him to buy the magazine. (When he was seventeen Campbell found the Weird Tales issue which had terrified and attracted him ten years earlier, only to discover the cover was much less horrific than he'd remembered.)

‘Speaking Science Fiction’ began as a way of celebrating the new life of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection at the University of Liverpool. The Collection, developed by the Science Fiction Foundation as a research library for the benefit of those engaged in the study and scholarship of sf, is now the largest publicly available collection of science fiction and material about science fiction in the UK, given new impetus by Liverpool's MA in Science Fiction, the first in the country. It contains material in many languages, as well as specific sub-collections such as the Myers Collection of Russian science fiction, and numerous manuscripts and collections of papers deposited by authors and editors such as Ramsey Campbell and Colin Greenland. Together with the Eric Frank Russell and Olaf Stapledon Archives, it forms one of the largest resources of sf-based material anywhere. We are grateful to the University of Liverpool and the Friends of Foundation for ensuring the survival of the Collection at a moment of crisis, to the Higher Education Council for England for funding a two-year cataloguing project, and to the Heritage Lottery Fund for recently enabling Liverpool University to purchase the John Wyndham Archive.

A library of science fiction is a library of Babel: a collection of fictions classified as ‘science fiction’ because someone, somewhere, has decided that they reflect, somehow, one of the many definitions of sf. One of the implied themes of ‘Speaking Science Fiction’, held in Liverpool in July 1996, was this underlying debate about the field: a debate which has in recent years become more intensified as more attention is given to the body of literature called—or miscalled—‘science fiction’. The conference was to some extent a celebration of Liverpool University's rescue of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection, but it came at an auspicious time. The previous year had seen one of the rare British hostings of a World SF Convention (Glasgow, 1995), and 1996 was also to see another major academic conference devoted to the field (Luton's ‘Envisaging Alternatives’). The following year was also to see the annual Easter SF Convention held in Liverpool and here many of the conference delegates met again to continue discussing some of the implications thrown up by ‘Speaking Science Fiction’.